Why The Concept Of Having A Soul Is So Important

September 17, 2025

Jack R. Noel

My favorite definition of soul is as follows:

1. A part of humans regarded as immaterial, immortal, separable from the body at death, capable of moral judgment, and susceptible to happiness or misery in a future state.
2. This part of a human when disembodied after death.
3. In Aristotelian philosophy, an animating or vital principle inherent in living things and endowing them in various degrees with the potential to grow and reproduce, to move and respond to stimuli (as in the case of animals), and to think rationally (as in the case of humans).

Anyone who knew me even 15 years ago would not expect me to be talking about the idea of soul today. But I’ve had the benefit of nearing the end of my own life. Recently the death of a friend I’ve known since I was five years old convinced me that there has to be more to life than just a brief time on this Earth. In addition, a younger brother and a younger sister both died long before the average life span of a modern human being. The sister, Nancy, died of cancer at the age of twelve.

You can believe this or not but three days after her death, we were sitting at dinner when we distintcly heard a baby crying — the sound came from the bedroom where our twelve year old sister died. That was the first time my disbelief in an afterlife was eroded. Somehow we all knew: that was the sound of our sister’s soul being…